Who are top wine influencers on social media? No one.

I love it when articles like this one come out listing the top people in wine social media. My reason for loving this is quite simple in that it allows me to use a word I don’t often use as I’m not British which is, bollocks.

Beyond the fact that the author of the article also pops up as the 4th “most influential” person in wine social media is that this list commits a seriously felony in that it blends people from the real world with people from the digital world. Suffice to say, would I buy a wine recommended by Wine Spectator? Sure. Jancis Robinson? You bet. Tim Atkin? Probably. Decanter? Indeed. A list of these types are a list of people or entities that have a solid presence in the real world which has then followed them in to the digital world.

I’ve got another news for you as we start the new year, the importance of social media for wine is not going to decrease in 2016 either.

I had to actually read that twice because I knocked my keyboard on the floor and then had to change my underwear from laughing so hard. Social media has zero effect on wine buying no matter how much marketing folks want to claim it’s how millennials will find their wine. Oh wait, I suppose it is true when I look at this case of wine I bought because The Wine Wankers (#3 Most Influential) put up an Instagram shot of it the other day. Except that I didn’t and I won’t because I un-followed all their feeds due to their incessant, never-ending posts that truly live up to the “wanker” part of their name.

So why on earth would these established and actual influencers sully themselves with social media if I’m right and it is indeed ineffective in terms of wine? For the same reason that they have email mailing lists and offer discounts on subscriptions to their magazines in that they want to use every outlet possible to get eyeballs on their articles to justify their advertising rates. It’s also the case that people (myself included) thought that social media would eventually lead to something useful in the wine world. It hasn’t and it won’t. As people ignore it more and more that transition from digital to real world in terms of wine–something you have to physically imbibe–gets ever more impossible and it comes back around to the fact that those who influence wine are actual wine critics, not someone who opened a Twitter account and deemed themselves as such.

But lastly, this list is just silly. Sure, there are some people in there with impressive numbers in terms of followers and what not but the Klout score really means nothing. If you dropped in a few more places, you’d soon get to Vinologue which has a score of 61. It has this despite our putting in maybe 20 minutes a week in to it. Every so often we put in a little more activity but it generally falls flat and trying to do promotions or anything meaningful with it? Forget about. The surest way on the Vinologue Instagram to have a photo fail is to put up anything the least bit product-related.

As I said previously, social media and wine are done. It’s going to take a bit more time for that to sink in given how much effort a lot of people have put in to building up a “following” but it just won’t ever work.

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6 responses to “Who are top wine influencers on social media? No one.”

Social media is still a relatively new tool, and wineries/those in the industry haven’t been using it very long. Trusted entities like Jancis Robinson and Wine Spectator and Decanter are trusted partially because they’ve been doing it for so long, so it seems short-sighted to say ‘well, I’ve been tweeting for a year now and my sales haven’t gone up from the links I’ve put there, so I think this whole thing isn’t going to work’. Social media is all about trust and relationships, and those take time to build. Do you think Jancis Robinson was an immediately trusted and revered taste-maker when she started 40 years ago? No. It took time. Social media is no different.

Social media also isn’t going away any time soon. It’s the new main street, the new store front. Increasingly, if you don’t exist on social media you simply don’t exist at all. So, again, it would be quite short-sighted for any industry to ignore it simply because the results took a while to surface.

Social media is actually quite old when you get down to it, especially in terms of the speed of the internet. I’ve had my account for eight years on Twitter both personal and for @vinologue so this isn’t just some “tweeted once, didn’t work” jump to conclusions. It’s based upon a lot of time with the medium and the fact that the only people who have made money with social media are the platforms themselves with their advertising, especially in the case of Facebook.

And actually, Jancis Robinson did indeed gain a decent following right from the start of her career as a wine writer, simply because she’s good and she didn’t even have the WSET Diploma until two years after her first writing gig. She would be successful today were she 40 years younger and starting for the first time. You can’t tell me that whomever her inheritor will eventually be, will be someone who made their fame on social media? This individual will come from a proper writing and research background as she did.

As for not existing if you’re not on social media, I have a simple question for you: how many of the most expensive and well-regarded wineries in the world have an active engagement in Twitter or Facebook? And from the other end, what wineries have risen to fame due to social media? The answer is the same.

It’s still wine critics, who have a base in traditional media that are the influencers and at this point, I don’t see that changing at all.

I think you’ll find there are a huge amount of influencers making very VERY good money out of the social channels.

Regarding your question about which Wineries have risen to fame due to social media, none I can think of, but if you look to other spirits and alcohol brands, several have, so I imagine it’s just a case of budget.

If you’re inferring that people are many money by saying that social media is great and that they need to be paid to make it great for others, then I totally agree.

In terms of spirits and social media, that’s a very different thing as drinks like Vodka, Gin, Rum, etc. are essentially commodities that can be scale due to demand and the price is totally irrelevant of the cost. In other words, these are drinks that respond to all forms of marketing social or otherwise. If you’re to talk about more rare whiskies, then again you get back in to a wine-like territory and the best whiskies you don’t see making use of SM as like wines, they simply don’t need to.

I kind of understand your point but it feels like you’re putting social media out of context. First of all you cannot talk about social media a a whole package. Every one of them has precise usage and features that can be used to a personal or commercial use. Secondly, it is a very fast evolving media. Twitter that was the most used app 5 years ago is now completely dying and being replaced by newcomers like insta and snapchat. Lastly, social media are supposed to be used as supportive media and not on their own. You need background and a lot of content to truly influence. Influencing is not about direct selling. It’s about sharing knowledge, passion and keeping the always increasing interest for wine from the general public sky-rocketing.

Yeah, this is the normal line that I hear from people wanting to sell others on social media’s benefits but when it comes down to it, physical distribution of wine is the most important. And I am firmly of the belief that you can lump all social media into one basket as it suffers from the same flaws: too much noise and not being tangible for a product that can only be physically enjoyed. It’s a very different thing once we move the conversation to music or books or other items that can be sampled and even enjoyed fully online.